


The Day That Marked the End of the World

by hedge_bitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Darkness, Alternate Season/Series 11, Apocalypse, Death, Gore, Violence, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-04-16 21:33:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14173857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedge_bitch/pseuds/hedge_bitch
Summary: This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.





	1. Just the Beginning

* * *

**_One day, the angels will save us._**  
**_They will come from the sky, golden sunlight_**  
**_raindrops, singing songs of saviors._**  
**_Our hands will stretch up to the sun,_**  
**_grasping at their feathered wings,_**  
**_warm in the light of heaven._**  
**_They will pull us by our fingertips, up like air_**  
**_balloon clouds, up to the silver linings._**  
**_Our prayers will be answered,_**  
**_sky bound starlight wrapping us in love,_**  
**_whispering hope into our ears._**  
**_And then, as we see the entrance, shining in_**  
**_blistering beauty, they will let go,_**  
**_And watch us plummet back to earth again._**

* * *

**CHAPTER 1- JUST THE BEGINNING**

* * *

It all started with a dumbass mistake.

God, it was so long ago. The days have slipped into weeks, months, years. I stopped counting a long time ago. The memories feel like dreams now, vague and indistinct and wrung with nostalgia for an old life. . . Shit, I'm getting all teary-eyed about the fucking shithole of a world that was here before I accidentally flipped the switch on the mega-apocalypse and fucked up everything up royally.

I was so much younger then, so much more naïve about just how much the universe was turned against me. I thought I knew everything, thought I'd been in the business so long that I had seen everything there was to see, killed every monster, devil, and demon there was to kill. I thought I could take on the world. But I didn't know shit. All I knew was that I was too scared to be left alone in the middle of all that. And I would risk life and limb in order to keep things in my comfort zone. At that point, I'd lost all sense of reality. I'd gone to Hell and back, spent a year up to my neck in monster guts in Purgatory, jumped back and forth across the veil of death like it was a hopscotch corse. Death was just an inconvenience, something that took up my afternoon and by the end of the night I was up and fighting again like nothing happened. I had dodged the hands of fate so many times that it was just expected that I would do it again. I was Dean Winchester. _I couldn't die_.

But I could fuck up. Again and again _and again and again._

God, if I could go back to that night, I would do everything in my power to stop myself from making that choice.

The choice that would mark the beginning of the end.

That moment, in that church, when I took Sam's shaking hands in mine, seeing the glow of the trials fade from his skin, it felt like I had the light of Heaven cast down on me. When his eyes met mine, through all the blood and tears, I could see the ghost of a smile. I thought I had won. I had my Sammy back, however beat up and broken, I had him back alive in my arms. The gates of Hell could have turned into an express demon escalator straight up to the surface for all I cared. All I knew was that didn't have to fight the fight alone.

But as we stumbled out to the Impala like it was the ship bringing us asylum, things began to go to shit like they always do. I could feel an electricity in the air, like the static hum of the breeze that brings in a thunderstorm. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I stopped, looking out into that black summer night. John had beaten the hunter’s instinct into me along with all of his other preachy brainwashing shit a long time ago. Something was horribly wrong. I could sense it in the air like it was a giant flashing billboard ad. The world had gone silent, as if an enormous vacuum had come down from the heavens and sucked up all the sound, leaving my ears ringing at its sudden absence. Everything was still. The Earth was holding its breath, anticipating what would happen next.

And I, my own breath caught in the spaces between my teeth, brought my heavy gaze up to the swollen black sky, dread settling its way into my bones as I saw what I knew was coming, what I knew would happen all along, but never thought to put a goddamn stop to myself.

Each pinprick of light hung upon on the night was moving. They shot across the sky, miniscule white scrapes down the fabric of the night. I watched on in numb silence as the stars themselves seemed to fall from their holdings, raining down like shining shards of glass sprinkling from a shattered glass table in slow motion.

And God, I felt like the earth had dropped right out from under me and sent me tumbling too.

Sam collapsed to the ground, slipping from my unattentive grip and rolling onto the dirt. I could hardly find the clarity to react. My knees banged hard to the ground next to him, my numb hands pulling his prone form into my lap. I couldn't rip my eyes away from the sight above, like staring directly into the headlights of the car about to slam into you. My mouth was dry, Sam's skin was cold, and something deep in my chest was building up into a scream. _How could you do this? I just got him back!_ His eyes were still open, rolled into the back of his head, and I could see the reflection of the fallen angels in the whites of them. The night lit up like the early dawn, growing brighter and brighter as the angels plummeted towards the Earth. All I could to was rock Sam in my arms, begging for him to wake up, to come back to me, for everything I sacrificed not to be in vain. I screamed along with the angels who lost their homes, their everything, because I thought that I had lost the same, latching fruitlessly to the limp body of my broken brother splayed out on the grass. And later, I prayed out desperately in that hospital, shoulders slumped in exhaustion, suppressed tears crying out in hopelessness as I let that _thing_ take over my brother.

If I had known, goddammit, if I had known everything that would come after that, I would have let Sam go.

Nothing was worth the consequences of that one choice.

First came Abbadon, slipping through the cracks we should have sealed shut. Then the Mark of Cain, a insignia of all of humanity's darkest depravity, seared into my skin in an act of cowardice, a desperate grasping for straws when there were no avenues left. Followed by a high-strung search for that pompous Knight of Hell all while falling prisoner to the lascivious power of the Mark. Weeks, months, spent in a red haze, feeling the rage slither through my veins like a blazing serpent. Teeth always vibrating in my head, the ancient energy feeling as if it were about to burst right through my skin, like my body was too weak to contain it all. I lost sight of everything I thought important. I did things, horrible, gruesome things, things that would be permanently impressed into the backs of my eyelids like a dead fly under paint, would haunt my troubled sleep for the rest of my days. I pushed Sam away.

And then Metatron finally put me out of my misery.

Or so I thought, as I took my final breaths around the knife plunged deep into my chest. He had done the world a fucking favor. Taking me out of commission would benefit the common good far more than my half-assed attempts at being a savior did.

But God, he must have a sick sense of humor.

Waking up in my own room battered and bruised, the First Blade pressed into my palm, the last thing I expected was to see black eyes reflecting back at me in the mirror.

Those months as a demon. . .well, all I can say is that they were easily worse than Hell. No question.

Sam, the blindly loyal little dumbass that he always was, did the impossible and managed to turn me good again. He always had a new trick up his sleeve to bring me back, always new the right spell to cast or right being to harass in order to get me topside again. But I should have never let him dabble in finding a cure for the Mark.

I should have stopped him.

He didn't know about the curse. He didn't know what secrets were locked up by the wing-shaped scar that pulsed red on my forearm. He didn't hear the sharp words that Death himself uttered in that skeevy bar that turned my blood cold. I should have done something to stop him, should have known he would go behind my back and do it anyway, should have ended this all a long time ago in that church off that stretch of muddy road in the middle of nowhere, should have let him do what had to be done to make the world a better place instead of doing what would make my life easier.

I was ready to take Death's offer, to set everything that I had vainly undone back straight again, to keep Sam and the rest of the world safe from the curse I had foolishly taken on as a fruitless grab for power. It would have fixed everything. It would have ended the vicious cycle of death and resurrection that had brought great consequence upon the world we were set out to save.

But Sam, despite all his impulsive jabs at my character, his scathing remark of 'I would let you die' that made my vision go red, must have been just as terrified at the thought of being alone as I was. Kneeled there, looking me straight in the eye as I held Death's almighty scythe above his head, he would have literally given up the world just to keep me by his side. It wasn't the pictures that convinced me. It was the look in his eyes, the knowledge that he was looking at his own kin, at Dean Winchester, at the man who had practically raised him even though he was only a child himself, who had been right there beside him through thick and thin, to Hell and Heaven and everywhere in between. Not a demon, not a creature twisted by the influence of the mark, not his executioner. He knew he was looking at his own brother.

The scythe clanged to the ground, and then the world fell silent around us. For a split second, there was nothing but the pumping of blood in my ears and the whispering of Death's ashes as they drifted to the floor. Something clenched hard in my stomach, an iron fist clamping around my intestines. In that moment, I realized that once again, I had made the wrong choice. I chose myself, again. I chose my own life over the fate of the world.

I had committed my entire life to saving innocent people from the things that lurked in the shadows. The one thing that kept me going was the distant dream of creating a world free of monsters and demons, of leaving behind a legacy of peace and security, so people would no longer have to fear the dark.

And I had just gone and fucked that all up in one fatal swoop.

The ceiling cracked open and threw down a spike of blinding light, nearly knocking me on my ass. I blinked the stars from my eyes only to be stunned at the sight of my bare forearm, finally free of the Mark.

My goddamn stomach dropped straight out of my ass.

And Sam had the audacity to believe everything was okay.

I stumbled outside, almost letting myself believe it too, watching as the sun set on the horizon, just like any other day, holding my breath as I waited those painstaking few minutes for the other shoe to finally drop.

And, oh boy, did it. In the span of a breath the sky was ripped asunder. I watched in numb disbelief as lightning sparked along the sprawling grass, fingers of godly light touching down to the Earth one by one, like nothing I had ever seen before. A lock had been unlocked, the key tossed away and lost, an ancient cage burst open. The Darkness was here.

We only were able to watch on in stunned silence as it began to consume the world right before our eyes.

And after what felt like a lifetime, time finally snapped back into place around us, and we ran.

It was a force beyond all measure. The biggest and baddest of them all, once again released by our own follies, all of our combined mistakes leading up to that singular moment, us bolting across that field as the ground began to break apart beneath our feet. Each heartbeat felt like a timer ticking down the seconds we had left, the world whirling by as my vision tunneled on the Impala, like a sole beacon of salvation in the midst of a savage storm.

I could feel the fight go out of me as the back tire slid into that pothole. I could feel the weight of the world finally slip off my shoulders as I faced the Darkness head-on. Maybe fate wasn't just some old crack made up by some loony angels hell-bent on taking over the world. Maybe my existence was contrived simply to play out a sick game of destiny. Maybe every goddamn mistake I had made along the way happened for a reason. Maybe I had cashed in all my luck cards and I had finally run out. Maybe to this was were it was all meant to come to an end.

Me, Sam, my car, and the Universe-Destroyer itself.

I looked on as the Darkness blotted out the sun. I sat, numb, as it engulfed the dark blue sky, swallowed up the clouds, ate up the few meters of ground separating us as it rolled closer and closer. I did something I had been too terrified to do in my entire stint on this fucking shit-hole of a planet that I had come to call home.

I accepted death.

And it wasn't until Sam shoved me over and slammed his foot on the accelerator, sending us flying backwards, that I realized just how much of a fucking coward I was.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From this point, the stories diverge. For this is just the beginning of the end


	2. The God Killer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave up on rewriting this story so I'm just posting the rest of the original version here for a new audience. There are some remnants of editing and my incomplete rewrite, but I haven't done any editing since then, and I don't intend to do so for the rest of the chapters either, so sorry for any mistakes or typos and the terrible writing. I promise it gets better.

* * *

**Trees flicker with snickering spurs of hot flame** **  
** **Ground cracks and fissures under the** **  
** **soles of my hard feet** **  
** **Sky chokes on undulating clouds of acrid smoke** **  
** **Oceans churn black and furious with thick powder ash** **  
** **Beasts collapse in dirt and fester into the haggard earth** **  
** **Structures crumble into crystal and** **  
** **dust with my swift breath** **  
** **Sun wavers among chaos red** **  
** **and sorrowed and dimming** **  
** **Humans screech and cry with terror in** **  
** **light eyes as they run** **  
** **And I smile wide** **  
** **  
** **I am become Death, destroyer of worlds**

* * *

  **CHAPTER 2- THE GOD KILLER**

* * *

We drove like Hell.

Day and night spent behind the wheel just to keep that cloud in the rearview mirror. We rarely spoke, instead filling the silence with the intermittent radio broadcasts that buzzed by with each passing city. The civvies thought it was a cold front bringing in the storm of the century. Nothing to be afraid of. But we soon found out that it was far more ominous than just any big ass cloud. Everywhere it touched lost power, every town it covered saw no sun. The 'scientists' spewed out some electrical anomaly bullshit and called it a day, but that did nothing to alieve the building paranoia. Crazies came on interviews saying it was an alien invasion, a sign from God, the beginning of the Biblical apocalypse.

People fled their houses, their towns, uprooting in an instant and heading for the road, eyes set on the sun. Many gas stations we visited were wrung dry, cleaned completely out by fellow travelers. It was hell trying to find an empty hotel room most nights, and we often resorted to sleeping in the car, skipping showers in favor of getting a move on as soon as possible, the Darkness always looming on the horizon. The roads filled up quickly. Soon all major highways were lined bumper to bumper with loaded trucks and minivans, the air filled with the honking of horns as people grew more and more desperate watching the Darkness roll closer and closer.

After a while, the desperation sent people out on foot. We watched as families attempted to pack everything they could carry into their bags and suitcases, the dread heavy on their faces as they continuously glanced over their shoulders, setting off on the long strips of grass alongside the highway, leaving their cars and the last vestiges of their normal lives behind.

I did everything in my power to keep moving forward along the clogged back roads, slipping between abandoned cars and broken furniture, but even then we often became stuck with no other way out than back. Several days later, the Impala came sputtering to a stop on the side of a dirt road in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere, the gas meter down past empty. I wanted to fight, I wanted to convince Sam that we could find a gas station nearby and fill her up enough to keep going, but I knew it was fruitless. We had to keep moving. We had to stay away from whatever it was that was intent on devouring the world and every living thing on it.

It was a hard goodbye, but I gathered up my things, slung my bag over my shoulder, and slammed the trunk closed one last time before turning around and never looking back.

That hunk of metal was the only remnant of a home I had left.

I haven't seen it since.

We joined the other travelers in what was considered the largest mass exodus of the modern era. At first we stayed in the back of the pack, not too intent on chatting with the ruffled soccer moms or beaming dads that spat out dry attempts at jokes to lighten the mood.

We had no clue where we were headed.

Sam and I didn't know what to do. We did what little research we could when we were ahead of the Darkness, taking quick stops at libraries to look up anything we could find on the Darkness. But we never got very far before the lights started going out and we looked out the window to see the foreboding clouds rolling across the blue sky, felt the deep rumble of it in our bones.

We met several people on our trek. A real community formed between those who thought their best choice was to up and leave their towns, their families, to escape this huge black thing that painted the sky, growing bigger each day. It was strange to see how everyone was going the same way, but no one had an actual destination in mind. They all knew that they just had to walk each day and sleep each night, but never thought of the future, where they were going, where they would end up. All we did was follow the crowd.

It became normal, weeks of traveling, heading south at all costs, stopping in a lighted city every night, crowding in motels, restaurants, or abandoned houses for sleep. Most places we came upon were already empty, left for the dead by people who wanted a head start. Cars were left in streets, parked in driveways still running, doors unlocked, houses left just as they were, before their inhabitants jumped up and ran, along with their neighbors, their coworkers, their barbers, their dentists, their lawyers. Soon the whole country was moving, a huge migration, unlike any for thousands of years. The storm covered half of the United States, growing out from the epicenter where I lost the Mark, an enormous circle of destruction making its way across oceans, closing in on other continents. Other countries were panicking, unsure of what to do once it hit them. Governments were demanding research on it, wanting answers as to what exactly it was. But no one knew. It wasn't like any other storm or natural disaster that had ever occurred. Scientists couldn't identify it. They were stumped. All they knew was that it was, dark, and scary, knocked everyone's power out, and moved approximately a mile a day. That was enough to get people running.

But people started to give up. Many grew too tired, some were too old, too young, to go so far. Others grew hopeless, seeing no point in walking to our ends when we knew the Darkness would eventually swallow us whole. There was nowhere to go, no place you could escape it. They left us, trying to convince others to follow them to live in the Darkness, embrace it. They thought there was nothing to fear, nothing that could hurt them. But they were wrong. I knew that the Darkness was more than a huge blackout. Something that took God and all his angles to fight back could not be just a big smoke cloud.

But the more we walked, the more unsure we grew. We were reaching the end, closing in on the Gulf. Many wanted to continue into Mexico, but word was that they were closing their borders and shooting anyone who approached. It all sounded like a bunch of conspiracy nonsense, but the more I heard about it, the more I believed. Sam was weary of continuing on, but there seemed to be no other choice. The only place to go was forward, trekking on into the sun, keeping the Darkness at our backs. I couldn't stand to face it, knowing that it was I who brought it here. It's bad enough knowing it is always right behind you, looming over your shoulder, always ready to strike. There's nowhere you can go where you can't see it. Everywhere you turn, it is right there, rippling and rolling like black ocean waves, crawling closer and closer, the deep rumble that follows it shaking the earth, resonating in my chest. It never goes away.

But we never made it to the border. It took me several weeks to realize, but I finally did. All it took was seeing a small girl get beat to the ground for a single water bottle for the smoke to clear from my head. It was in that moment that I came to comprehend just how deep in the muck we were. It was like a blindfold had been pulled from my eyes, and I saw the world as sharp as glass. People were changing. Society was collapsing. Just a few weeks in, and what had held us so tightly together was snapping apart stitch by stitch. Family pets brought along as faithful companions were being stolen in the night and cooked up by the desperate. Children wandered around covered in their own filth, crying out for their parents. Young girls were being dragged from their hovels kicking and screaming and no one did anything to save them. And I never saw any of it. I was too busy pissing my pants about the fucking Darkness to see what corruption was going on around me. But I still didn't do shit about it.

We ran. We fled from it all, too overwhelmed to find a solution, too scared to face it all. We pulled away from the group, taking a rest stop at the nearest city and picking a nice house to crash in, where I regrettably got the best sleep I had in weeks. We stayed there for a few days, rummaging through library shelves, school classrooms, random houses. But it didn't take long before the Darkness caught up. We were in the middle of a mess of papers and ancient books in one of the town's small libraries when the whole building shook, the lights flickering off, plunging us into complete silence. That was when I realized why everyone was running. There is something so comforting about being ahead of the Darkness, living in the light. The destruction was all behind you, it wasn't your problem. But when you had to sit and watch as the clouds reached the horizon and sealed you in complete darkness, you felt trapped, suffocated. And as the days went on, the Darkness's fingers only reached farther, the dark only getting darker as our battery powered lights and appliances died, I only grew more restless, the weight of claustrophobia crushing my chest, making it hard to breath, hard to think. I never thought that something as freeing as the sky could be stolen from us, capping us off from the stars and planets above that assured us that we weren't alone. I didn't know how much I loved the sun until I couldn't see it, feel its warmth on my skin. It was so cold now. It was colder than any winter I had lived through. And with no electricity, there was no heating in any of the houses. We had to wear coats we stole from other peoples' closets to keep warm. It was so quiet. There was no way to communicate with anyone. The cloud cut off any satellite connections or radio waves. We were completely alone.

I lost count of how many days we were there. There were a few battery operate clocks we found lying around, but I eventually stopped looking at them. It didn't matter anymore. There was no day, no night. Just complete and utter darkness, 24/7.

When we didn't find any info on the Darkness, we moved on to the next town. Then the next. Then the next. We never found much, just mentions or theories about Darkness, never anything helpful. We lived by flashlights, firelight if we were lucky enough to find working lighters. Good food left in stores and houses were long past expired, so we mostly ate junk food left on drug store shelves, stuffed in the backs of pantries and cabinets. Sometimes we would stumble upon small backyard gardens, digging in the dirt for any surviving fruits or veggies. Those were the only times I was grateful for rabbit food. But the one time Sam caught a few ducks wading in a grimy swimming pool was one of the few times we had a good meal.

We met a few people that were walking through, who still had hope of reaching the light. We didn't stop them, just asking what the knew about the outside world. Most knew just as much as us, others saying that they heard from someone who heard from someone that the Darkness had made it past England and was moving into Asia and Africa. Some said that it had already covered all of the Americas and was crawling across the arctic circle. Either way, the Darkness wasn't slowing.

Months had passed since I had released the Darkness. It was hard to find food you didn't have to kill first. Getting gas for stolen cars was difficult, most gas stations being ravaged and cleaned out long ago. You were lucky to find running water, let alone clean water. Living in the area that people had left behind was fine at first, but the farther in you went, the less resources were left. People had already trampled through, run the places dry. But we had to keep looking. There had to be an answer somewhere. Someone other than God had to know how to shut up the Darkness again. Everywhere we looked we came up empty handed, but we kept moving on, hope keeping us on our feet, keeping us moving.

That is, until Cas showed up.

The first thing I did was punch him in the face. Sam scolded me for it, but what did he expect? I had been praying to that little winged rat for ages, every time I woke up, when I went to sleep. I prayed to him each time I choked down hopeless tears when Sam was asleep, because I was so fucking lost. But he never answered. I started to think that the Darkness blocked my messages to him, after many desperate confessions and threats left me feeling more alone than ever, but Cas said he heard everything, which was a little embarrassing on my part, but he didn't seem to care. He went on about how he killed Crowley, how he felt the Darkness as it ripped the universe apart, and how he has been in heaven ever since, helping the angels as they frantically ran around instead of getting a damn thing done. That is what made me angry, knowing that we were literally the only ones in the universe trying to fix this mess I made. But Cas was adamant that there was nothing that could be done unless God was here, and that he and the other angels were searching the darkest corners of the universe to find him.

He also almost forgot to mention that the Darkness was only days away from engulfing the entire planet. That sure was assuring. Even Sam got angry then, screaming at Cas, asking how in heaven all of God's angles couldn't even stop a big storm cloud. I mean, I agreed with him. They literally pulled us both out of hell just 'cause they wanted to. But they can't bag a cloud of literal darkness? Or at least find their own father?

He left soon after, whether it was because he was needed in heaven, or he was afraid of being on the receiving end of some Winchester wrath. But everything went back to normal. Well, as normal as it can be when your world is about to cloaked in complete darkness.

Until Cas came back a few days later, stumbling into the run down house we were slumming in, wide-eyed and panicked, talking so fast that it took me a second to understand what he was saying.

"The Darkness has closed around the Earth. And it has made it to heaven."

**  
**

 


	3. The Day the Earth Stood Still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.

* * *

**_The angels took the stars away._ ** ****__  
**_One by one, they blinked out of the sky,_ ** ****__  
**_Like broken Christmas lights._ ** ****__  
**_Each night we would sit on our roof top,_ ** ****__  
**_Tears running as the lights would burn out._ ** ****__  
**_Last night the last star turned off,_ ** ****__  
**_The night sky a blank slab of darkness._ ** ****__  
**_We thought that was the end of it,_ ** **_  
_ ** **_But the sun did not rise this morning._ **

* * *

**__**

#####  **CHAPTER 3- THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL**

* * *

#####  ****

It only took us a few days to realize that covering the world up in the universe's fart clouds wasn't the Darkness's only plan.   
  
Cas informed us that the Darkness skipped the angel training program and crashed straight through the pearly gates, shortly after it finally sealed us in. He slipped through at the last second before it closed up, but he caught a snip of the angels screaming over angel radio, talking about the Darkness breaking into heaven. But after the last rays of sunlight were blocked out, there was nothing. He was completely cut off, no angel radio, no getting out. He was just as trapped as we were.   
  
He also told us that the whole world was in a state of panic. There wasn't a single light on on the entire planet. No lights, no heating, no phones, no internet, nothing. Back to the stone ages, I guess.   
  
Cas used some of his angel mojo to hook us up with some food from some place in Asia, were ever it was freshest. We had a little feast while we went over everything we knew, which turned out to pretty much nothing. All we had was the fact that we could do diddly-squat without God's help. And we wouldn't even know if the angels were making any progress finding him, since our messenger had just gotten his wings clipped. But since they were then preoccupied with the Darkness, they probably didn't have the time.   
  
"So, Cas, do you think you can zap us back to the Bunker?" All that running around, running in fear from the Darkness, reminded me of our childhood, Dad bursting into the motel room in the middle of the night, frantically throwing his stuff into his bags, telling us to do so as well. I remember how terrifying it was to see him like that, screaming at us to run, locking us all in the car and just driving away as fast as we could, always keeping an eye on our backs. It was in those moments where the high pedestal I held my father atop of crumbled a little bit, the fear in his eyes so real, so true. He wasn't as brave as I believed him to be.   
  
And we weren't either.   
  
"Yes, I can. That should be fairly easy."   
  
"No, I mean, is it safe there? Has anyone ransacked it? Could there be people in there?" I asked, wiping my hands on my shirt. It's not like it could get any dirtier.   
  
"Yes, just let me check." The second the last word left his mouth, he was gone, fluttering the food wrappers and papers littering the table. I gave Sam an annoyed look, barely able to take a breath before Castiel was sitting in front us again, almost as if he was never gone in the first place.   
  
"The Bunker is just as you left it. It should be safe to go back at any time you chose."   
  
I looked back to Sam, shrugging at the mirrored look on his face. "Okay, let's just go now."   
  
Cas didn't say a word, just reaching over and pressing his fingers to our foreheads. Next thing I knew, I was falling on my butt in a dizzying blur of color, rapidly blinking the spots out of my eyes. Cas was standing over us, looking down at me with that stupid blank expression. But then I realized where we were. Home. Or at least the closest thing we had to one that wasn't a hulking metal death trap. (A hulking metal death trap that I loved.) I could smell the books before anything else, the familiar scent of rotting paper and molding pages sudden and sweet. I was on my feet in a second, eyes searching around through the permanent darkness for everything I had grown to miss without realizing it. My fingers roamed the bookshelves, trailed along the walls, feet finding the creaky floor boards, the old stained carpets. It wasn't until my eyes adjusted that I made it to my room, collapsing on my bed with a smile foreign on my cheeks. Sam was at my door soon after, his feint grin barely visible in the dark.   
  
"Man, I can't believe how much I missed this place," he said, leaning on my door frame.   
  
"Yeah, home sweet home. It's hard to think that we just let this place behind. I shouldn't have made us keep running. It seriously got us nowhere."   
  
"No, it's fine, Dean, really. We were all caught up in the madness. Running was the only option at the time. We're just lucky that Cas got locked up with us, or we probably would have never made it all the way back here." He sniffed, looking down at his feet, his form barely visible through all the layers of clothes.   
  
"Well, it still sucks that there is no power. I mean, we're not any better here than any other place. All we have is tons of books and a bunch of super old artifacts. They won't do much good for keeping us warm and fed." I sat up on the edge of the bed, a smirk growing on my face. "Unless we burnt the books. Maybe we could eat the paper too. I bet that would be fun."   
  
I could only imagine the look of horror on Sam's face as he shook his head and left. I could hear each of his steps, the loud buzzing of the lights and humming of old energy gone, taken away by the Darkness, letting an eerie silence settle over the Bunker.   
  
It wasn't a minute later that Sam came stomping back, a stiff shadow in my doorway once again. "Uh, you might want to come out here. We have a problem."   
  
I jumped up followed him to the kitchen to see Castiel with his head in the refrigerator, pulling things out and tossing them straight on the floor. It took me a second to register the smell. The scent of old dumpsters or porta-potties left out in the sun all day. It made me gag, slapping a hand over my mouth to hold in my lurching stomach.   
  
"Yeah, all the food is about five months expired," Sam said, his nose crinkling in disgust.   
  
"Aw, seriously? Fuck!" I exclaimed, kicking a bag of soggy apples at my feet.   
  
Sam looked at me, raising an eyebrow. "What? Did you expect it all to be exactly how we left it?"   
  
"No, it's just that...we have to deal with all this now," I sighed, trudging forward to help Castiel with all the rotting food.   
  
"Well, it's either live with the smell, or get rid of it."   
  
We found a few garbage bags and stuffed all the food in them, trying not to throw up all over the place the whole time. I thought that dead bodies were gross, but when you can't tell what a food is because it is so coated in mold, or when you find milk so spoiled that it is as thick as Jell-O, you start to think you would rather be digging up corpses in the cemetery.   
  
We ended up dumping all the "degradable" stuff, as Sam put it, in the woods about a quarter mile away from the bunker. The rest was thrown out in the big ditch on the edge of the tree line, to be left until we found a better place to dispose of it. It wasn't likely that the garbage man was going to roll up in his truck and take it all away in the middle of the apocalypse, or whatever this was.   
  
Then we set on to researching. We scavenged through book after book, file after file, Cas meanwhile setting fires in each of the fire places and lighting every candle we had, an attempt at some semblance of a normal life, well more like a medieval life, reading by firelight like some kind of village peasants. But at least it was warm. After months of an arctic winter so cold that it left ice in my bones, it was comforting to actually put a use to all of the many fire places.   
  
But the comfort didn't last. We were up for days, it seemed, making our way through shelves of books, cabinets of folders, every locked box and safe in the whole Bunker. Every small reference led to the hope of finding something in the next book, and the next, and the next. But we always came up empty handed, the only text of any importance saying that the Darkness was the most powerful thing in the universe, other than God himself, and could only be brought down by his hand. What we didn't find was anything about what the Darkness actually was, what it could do, or where the hell it came from. This wasn't like any of our old hunts. We didn't have years of compiled knowledge on our hands. Even the goddamned Men of Letters didn't know shit. No one expected to have the Darkness unleashed on this world again, most didn't even know what it was. So, after days of freezing our asses off and taking turns going out to hunt down some food, we finally just gave up. Well, I gave up, throwing my books across the room and knocking everything off of one of the tables before going out to shoot some stuff without saying another word.   
  
That was when things changed.   
  
I was about a mile out, armed with my shot gun and a small flash light. The anger and hopelessness were hot coals in my stomach, hands tight around the rifle as they slowly fizzled out. The forest was completely silent, still as a painting. It was all so deafening, the quiet that came along with the darkness. The hum of life, of machines and people and the earth was stolen, sucked up along with the light and the stars. It was as if the whole world was frozen in one moment in time, as if the Earth had stopped moving and everything had stopped existing. No noise, no light, no warmth, no weather, no change.   
  
Hunting was getting harder, few animals able to survive in the severe cold, most plants already withered and dead in the lack of sun and rain. Everything was brown and brittle, the ground a grave of fallen leaves and rotting foliage. No food for the herbivores, no food for the carnivores, no food for us.   
  
Attempting to not be deterred by the complete and utter lack of everything, I was about to move further into the dense trees, hoping to find something to quell the growling in my stomach, when the world exploded.   
  
A light brighter than any sun stabbed daggers into my eyes before I slammed them shut, the sound of a thousand drum beats all at once ripping through my ear drums, the ground dropping out from under me and leaving me falling forever.   
  
And then it was all over.   
  
My eyes were blinded with blue spots, ears ringing, back cold and stiff against the hard ground. The breath was knocked out of my lungs, leaving me gasping and grabbing at something to help me get back on my feet. Tree bark scraped my fingers, the smell of mud clogging my nose. It took a while to sit up even, head spinning and stomach churning to the point that I couldn't tell which way was up.   
  
The scream is what got me running.   
  
The loudest, most blood curdling, inhuman scream I have ever heard, so loud that it caused birds to flock from their hiding places and fill the sky with their noise. For a moment, it drowned out the screaming, feathers flying, the whole sky looking like it was moving, black on black.   
  
I was on my feet in seconds, gun in hand, sprinting through the cacophony and chaos, barely dodging trees and branches as I searched for the source of the tortured soul. Each step was a breath take, feet pounding and chest heaving. I had never run so fast in my life, and I didn't even know what would be at the end of my path. All I knew was that something was wrong, and it was my primal instinct to stop any trouble.   
  
I almost tripped trying to stop in my tracks when I met a clearing. In the dark, I could barely make out a form a few feet away, the screeches so piercing that I had to cover my ears to stop them from bleeding or something. The thing-person-was in pain. I could tell that much. They were writhing around in the dark, kneeling on the ground in the center of the clearing, not even taking a notice to me.   
  
That was, until I decided to turn my flashlight on for a better look.   
  
It had barely been on a second before and unearthly shriek echoed through the trees and the thing was barreling toward me. I saw a flash of it before it pounced on me, pale skin, dark hair, small nose, gaping mouth, snapping teeth, black eyes. The ground punched me in the back, my head cracking against an exposed tree root. I couldn't breathe as the thing ravaged my chest, growling and screaming, nails clawing through my shirt, fists pounding on my skin. It was insanity, complete and utter madness and my hands were grasping arms and hair and clothes in an attempt to get it off. Slobbering and snapping, rabid, ferocious, vicious, monstrous. I was floundering like a fish, panicked and terrified, my gun fallen and a few feet away, my arms not strong enough to shove the creature off.   
  
Its face was just inches away from mine, something born of a nightmare. Feminine, with long dark hair that hung in my eyes and tickled my cheeks. But her skin was charred, burned pink and brown, blood a red mask, dripping and still fresh and rank. All I could see was teeth, barely held back from my face with my forearm. Half of her face was ripped off. Skin, muscles, bones, gone. From ear to nose, all there was was chipped and rotten teeth, exposed cheek bone and half of a lower jaw, tongue hanging out and dripping saliva on my face. She had no eyes. Just empty sockets, as if her eyes had just burst out her skull, leaving bits of muscle and torn flesh hanging and bloody out of her black hole eyes.   
  
My free hand groped the ground for something, my gun, my flashlight, a rock. A rock. My fingers latched around a large rock and in seconds it was slamming against her skull and I was on my stomach and scrambling for my gun. My finger was on the trigger as I turned around and the bullet was buried in her chest before I could even blink. She fell to the ground with a soft thud!, and silence engulfed the world again. All there was was my labored breaths, and the startled birds settling back into the trees like nothing ever happened. My flashlight cast a beam of golden light across the brush on the ground where the girl was when I found her. I noticed that the ground was clear in some spots, the light showing on singed earth in sharp patterns where the grass and leaves were burned away. I hefted myself up and picked up the flashlight, shining it on the ground, revealing a circle of broken dirt, a shallow hole in the center, lines branching out from it like cracks, like lightning bolts.   
  
I turned the flashlight on myself, blood oozing and glistening on my chest through the holes in my shirt, the claw marks just breaking the skin. But they still stung like hell, though.   
  
Stepping back over to the girl, the light letting out the secrets that the darkness holds so close. I could see that the girl was wearing a dirty T-shirt and ripped jeans, and several coats, all burned. The bottoms of her shoes had melted to her feet, the smell of burning rubber and burning flesh still heavy in the air. Jagged lines ribboned her skin, in the same pattern as the forest floor, a lightning strike preserved in her cooling skin. A backpack was strung across her shoulders, and when I finally managed to get it off her, I found that it contained the charred remains of a few pairs of extra clothes, two bags of chips, beef jerky, a metal water bottle, a small hunting knife, and a half empty box of matches. She seemed like she was just passing through here, maybe looking for food like me, maybe she saw the smoke rising from our chimneys and thought that she could find shelter. Maybe she was lost out here all alone, left for dead, and was trying her hardest to survive. Maybe she was just like us.   
  
But then that light struck her, tore her apart, warped her mind, turned her into the enemy.   
  
That light that was so unlike anything I had ever heard about, so new, so terrifying. A phenomenon never before seen. Lightning that existed in a lightless world, came from the black slab of a sky that bared no weather, no storms. That light came from the Darkness.   
  
That was when I knew that the Darkness was just getting started.   
  



	4. The Clocks Were Striking Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.

* * *

**_Flowers drip with cool coal rain_ ** ****_  
_ **_Coughing putrid butterflies_ ** ****_  
_ **_Trees sway naked in the freezing wind_ ** ****_  
_ **_Grass shrivels like rotten apple cores_ ** ****_  
_ **_Forest foals lay rotting_ ** ****_  
_ **_Bones display the carnage_ ** ****_  
_ **_Sun a distant memory_ ** ****_  
_ **_Sky a swollen midnight_ ** ****_  
_ **_No stars to sing their melodies_ ** ****_  
_ **_No light to guide our weary feet_ ** ****_  
_ **_  
_ ** ******_Death is all around us_**

* * *

  **CHAPTER 4- THE CLOCKS WERE STRIKING THIRTEEN**

* * *

 It was a surprise for Sam and Cas when I walked in with not with the day's catch, but instead the dead body of the girl slung over my shoulder.  
  
But of course, the first thing Sam noticed was how clawed up I was.  
  
"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice on the verge of panic as he strode up to me, an open book dangling forgotten from his fingertips.  
  
"Yeah, m'fine, just clear off a table or something so I can lay this chick down," I said, my voice wilting as I let out a heavy sigh. That was when I realized just how tired I was, sagging under the weight of the girl, the weight of those past days. With this new problem, it all had become too much, and I was already dreading what was to come. It all just wore me to the bone.  
  
Sam and Cas set to clearing off the counter in the kitchen, Sam getting all pissy about having the right lighting, Cas just following along. I stood in the doorway, barely able to stay on my feet, too exhausted to be annoyed. It was all just noise to me, along with the high-pitched ringing that still plagued my ears from the lighting blast.  
  
Finally, I laid the girl down on the counter, cold and metal like an examining table. What a literal weight off my shoulders.  
  
"What happened?" Sam asked, gloved hands positioning the girl's limbs. Castiel was holding a lantern, peering over at her face with squinted eyes.  
  
"Uh, a big light came from the sky, struck the girl, I'm guessing. She was just walking through-" I realized that I still had her bag slung over my shoulder. I took it off, setting it on the counter. "She had this with her, seemed like she was coming this way for shelter. She might have been lost."  
  
"So you think the light did this to her?" Sam asked, looking up from her face that he was inspecting.  
  
"Yeah, did you see it? I was only a few yards away from where it struck. It left a crater and everything. I ran over there when I heard the girl screaming."  
  
"Yeah, we saw it from the window. It was far too bright to be normal lightning. It shook the whole bunker too. Made one of the windows break."  
  
"Great." I sighed. "Well, this girl attacked me when I got to her. She was like that when I found her. I had to shoot her to get her off me."  
  
"So, she went down with just a normal bullet?"  
  
"Yeah, I guess she is still human. That light changed her, though."  
  
"Well, physically, it seems like the effect of extremely high voltage." He turned over her arm, tracing a finger over the lighting scars. "But any kind of exposure that high would kill you in an instant. There is no way she could have survived that."  
  
"You said that it couldn't be any normal lightning. Maybe it came from the Darkness." I leaned against the cabinets, pulling at my shirt so it wouldn't chafe at my raw skin.  
  
"Cas, go help him get cleaned up," Sam ordered, eyes glossing over my discomfort before going to the girl again.  
  
"No, no, I'm fine-" But Cas was already striding towards me, fingers out-stretched. There was only a few seconds between him pressing his fingertips to my forehead and the cuts on my chest healing over, the skin sealing shut with that strange tingly feeling that I could never get used to.  
  
"So, you said that she was screaming?" Sam questioned, focus immediately back to the matter at hand.  
  
"Uh, yeah, she was going crazy after the lightning hit. It must have did something to her, not just physically." I sighed, not able to find the right words to describe what I was thinking. "Look, I have a good feeling that this is the Darkness. I mean, what else could it be?"  
  
"No, no, I think you're right. This is definitely something powerful. Very powerful." He started to go through the bag, setting each item in it on the counter in a line. In the dim light of the lantern, I saw then that one of the girl's extra shirts had a college logo on it, something nearby, probably.  
  
"Well, what do you think?"  
  
"What?" He looked up at me, a strained look on his face.  
  
"What do you think this is?" I emphasized, gesturing to the girl.  
  
"Oh, well, there is a strong possibility that it is the Darkness."  
  
"I there even anything else that it could be?"  
  
"Not that I know of." That was all he said, his tone dark, uncaring, void of hope. That was when I left, not in a rage, not in a huff. I trudged back to my room, feet barely able to carry me forward, and collapsed on my bed. But I did not sleep.  
  
Hours later, my door opened. It had been hours of silence, of deep cold and quiet crying. I didn't even bother to wipe the tears from my cheeks when Sam stepped in, a candle in hand, leaving his face a deep shadow. It's not like he could have seen them anyway.  
  
I didn't move when he sat at the foot of my bed, placing a hand on my ankle so gently that I could barely feel it through the five pairs of socks I was wearing. He didn't say anything at first, the silence deafening in the blinding darkness. Over those first months, I had come to think of the silence and darkness as the same thing. It was always dark. It was always quiet. They were one in the same, haunting us like the ghosts of those we killed, the ones we left behind, digging deep into our souls during toss-and-turn hours of the forever night after all the candles had burned out and the fires went cold. It clung to our skin, taking away our faces, stealing away our voices. It twisted our senses, turning shadows into monsters and creaks and cracks into screams. It locked us in boxes made of fear and made us want to beg for our nightlights like the little babies we were.  
  
"You okay?" Sam's voice asked, high and hopeful. I could only see the outline of his head, the line of his long nose. I could barely remember what the color his eyes were.  
  
I didn't answer at first, afraid that my voice would not be loud enough to overpower the silence, not sure if I still even had a voice. I watched the candle flicker for a moment, afraid that the flame would one day go out and never come back again.  
  
"Did you find anything on the girl?"  
  
Sam sighed, his head dipping down in defeat. "No. Cas and I have been going through the books again, in case we missed anything about some kind of super-lightning. But there wasn't anything more than what we found before." He paused, sighing lightly. I imagined that he was watching the candle too, seeing the way the dim light cast over his hand that was clenched tightly around the candle holder, as if he might lose it. "It was a lot easier back when we still had internet."  
  
Internet. The word was a shock, so unfamiliar that it took me a moment to remember that life had not always been this way, the memories of before flying by me so fast that it felt like I was falling. More tears slipped down my cheeks when I remembered driving in the Impala with Sam, singing along to music and laughing, all of it feeling like another life, so far away that I couldn't even imagine reaching it. I can't remember the last time I smiled.  
  
"So, we know nothing."  
  
He sighed louder this time. "No." His voice broke.  
  
The silence filled the room again. It was so eager, screaming through the spaces between words, trampling on the ends of our sentences, swallowing up our air, making it hard to breath.  
  
"Are you okay?" He breathed, so quiet that I could barely make it out.  
  
"No, Sam. I'm not," I snapped, sitting up and looking into the darkness where his face should have been. My voice was strained, lips trembling to hold back cries, fists clenching in the cold sheets as I blinked at him, blinked the burning tears away.  
  
"Why?" His head was down again, as if he couldn't bear the thought of me looking at him, maybe unable process the fact that his big brother was there crying in front of him like a little bitch.  
  
"Why?" I demanded, voice rising. "You wanna know why? Because I am so fucking lost and I don't know what to do. Because I want this to be like every other time, when everyone figures out how to fix everything and gives us all the answers. Because I am waiting for a big bad to come and kill everyone that we love before we stab it and then everything will be over. Because I am so fucking scared that I can barely think straight and I feel like there is no end to this and I can't do anything about it." The silence seemed to cower away from my voice, leaving my words echoing around the room long after I had finished, hands shaking in anger, fingers wishing to punch, grab, throw, anything to release all of the energy.  
  
I held my breath as I waited for him to yell at me, accuse me of being a coward, leave the room, slam the door, punch me, anything.  
  
"I'm scared too."  
  
The door slammed open and both our heads turned. A rough outline of Castiel stood there, nothing but a shadow against the black background of the hallway.  
  
"You need to see this."  
  
We were back in the kitchen in seconds, chasing after Cas's coat tails in a panicked flurry, unsure of what would meet us when we got there.  
  
The girl still lay on the counter, still as a statue. I could barely see her, most of the candles blown out hours ago. Cas and I set hurriedly to lighting them again, Sam leaning over the corpse with wide eyes.  
  
"She's bleeding."  
  
"What?" I snapped around in an instant, leaning over beside him, face screwed up in disbelief.  
  
"She's bleeding from her ears. Seems like it's coming from her eyes and nose too."  
  
Cas brought a lantern over, light warming her face and showing the trails of dark liquid from her eyes and nose, pooling under her head and caking in her hair. Sam was pulling another pair of gloves on hastily as Cas wiped some off of her face with two fingers and brought them to his nose, sniffing them.  
  
"This is not blood."  
  
"What?" Sam questioned, voice rising along with his eye brows. He brought a candle closer to her head, crouching down to inspect it closely. "It's black." He stood up again, casting a worried glance to the both of us.  
  
"What, do you mean like ectoplasm? Or Leviathan juice?"  
  
"Neither," Cas stated darkly, still inspecting the substance on his fingers. "It is something different. Something I have never seen before."  
  
I slammed my hands on the counter, desperately wishing that he was wrong, that it was just normal blood, and that we were freaking out over nothing. "What do you mean you don't know? You have to know! You're an angel for Christ's sake!"  
  
He gave me an annoyed look, letting his hand fall to his side as he took a step closer to me, looming over me like a skyscraper. I have never felt smaller in my life.  
  
"You are missing the point, Dean. The fact that I don't know what it is means that it is something even God did not know about. This means that we are facing something that God did not create, maybe something more powerful than even God Himself."  
  
The silence drew in, a heavy storm cloud that hung in the room like smog. I could feel it, pounding on my ear drums like gunshots, heartbeats, settling on my chest with the weight on the world. I could hear each of my ribs crack.  
  
"Well, what do we do?" Sam's voice was so quiet, yet so loud, grating against the empty air with the force of a thousand punches, reaching to me even through the swirling darkness.  
  
"We research more. Leave the girl and see how this progresses. Find answers."  
  
And that is exactly what we did. It was all that we knew to do. There was no better plans, no plans at all. Just like it has been the whole time. Either find answers or run. Run away from the problem, pretend that it doesn't exist, live in the delusion.  
  
So we went through all of our library, again, hope on our fingertips as they skimmed the pages in the dim light. Words we had read a thousand times, gone over meticulously, analyzed again and again. We kept going in the hope that we would find something that we had missed before, that we would find all the answers in the books that had no answers, because no one had the answers. But we still kept going, kept searching, even though we saw no end in sight.  
  
It was an infinite amount of time later when I had realized that Cas was gone, his books left open on the table on the other side of the room, chair still pulled out. I assumed that he was just in the stacks, looking for more books, but then he was there in front of me, papers fluttering off the table and book pages flapping, saying those words once again:  
  
"You need to see this."  
  
We were left fumbling blindly up the stairs after him, panicked feet pounding against the metal. He was silent the whole time, on his face a look of determination, stern and worried at the same time. He led us up the narrow stair case that exited to the roof, throwing the door open and storming out without a second glance. We followed, unsure of what he wanted, still curious all the same. We strode up to the edge, the end of our universe, looking out over the world created by the Darkness, the world stolen from us, and we saw it.  
  
There, in the sea of complete darkness, a pinprick break in the black ink night, a beacon amongst the heavy walls void of living, was light.


	5. Where the Sidewalk Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.

* * *

**_Light shines hope upon our foreheads_ ** ****_  
_ **_Warm fingers dancing on our skin_ ** ****_  
_ **_It embraces us in starlight symphonies_ ** ****_  
_ **_Bright orange orb hanging from a nail_ ** ****_  
_ **_Against the ocean in the sky_ ** ****_  
_ **_Cotton waves a constant ripple_ ** ****_  
_ **_Birds reach wings to the heavens_ ** ****_  
_ **_We stand on tip-toes_ ** ****_  
_ **_Stretching our fingers to the clouds_ ** ****_  
_ **_Wishing we could fly like they do_ ** ****_  
_ **_Fly so high that we are among the angles_ ** ****_  
_ **_Sing the songs of stars_ ** ****_  
_ **_Shake the hand of Father Sun_ ** **_  
_ ** ******_And burn up in his sunrays_**

* * *

  **CHAPTER 5- WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS**

* * *

I don't remember going to the garage. I don't remember hopping in one of the many untouched cars along with Sam and Cas and buckling up. I don't remember starting up the engine and speeding out of there.  
  
All I know is that I all of a sudden became aware that we were on the road, car screaming across the pavement, hands gripping the steering wheel and all I could see was that light. When I looked back, I saw that Sam and Cas were staring at it too, faces blank and voices silent. Cars were dead carcasses on the sides of the road, empty and soulless, seeming to have been thrown aside by something large that came barreling past. I had to weave around some, swerving to avoid crushed bumpers and open doors and their gutted entrails that littered the pavement. The headlights were halos pressing the Darkness away, brighter than anything I could possibly remember. They were blinding, bright as the stars that were a distant memory, almost as striking as the shaft of pure sunlight burning in the distance.  
  
It hid behind a tall hill, the skeletons of trees threatening to blot it out, bony fingers reaching for it, wishing to take it for themselves. It was golden, the light of angels, emitting from a perfect circle cut out from the sky. I was sure that God himself had hole-punched the Darkness, made a looking glass so he could peek down at us in our time of panic.  
  
The sun had freed us finally.  
  
Sam's fingers gripped the dash white-knuckle tight, leaning forward in his seat and craning his head to see out the window, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, forgotten words glued to his tongue. Cas's cheek was pressed to the window behind me, eyes reflecting the stripe of light against the endless darkness.  
  
I had no idea where I was going, but my foot still pressed to the pedal, hands turning the wheel, always in the direction of the light. I could feel it in my chest, the warm memories of sunlit afternoons and blood red sunsets, the way the sun used to rise each morning in a burst of color. It was a pull in my veins, skin screaming to feel that warmth again, soul begging to see the sky one last time. It pulled me forward, a rope tethered to my being, toward the beacon in the distance, a moth to a flame.  
  
The hum of the engine was the only sound in the world. No radios, no tapes, no CD's. Just darkness. Just a car on the road to nowhere, paved with the bodies of those who had already fallen off.  
  
The light in the distance was the only thing in existence. There was no way to prove that the asphalt under the tires wasn't the only thing besides. The world did not exist outside of my headlight glare. There was a bottomless pit gaping between this road and that lighthouse, and we had to step off the edge of the earth, where the sidewalk ends, and brave the twilight sea where the Darkness made its home.  
  
The only time I tore my eyes away from the light was to swerve around a body laid crumpled on the street, ringed by a puddle black blood, eyes empty and seeping pitch ooze.  
  
It was a city.  
  
A town.  
  
Tucked among the trees, the road signs reflecting in the headlights like Christmas lights, all red and green and yellow.  
  
Everything was dead.  
  
Cars that cowered on corners, lay sideways across intersections, smashed to bits against walls, wrapped around light poles. Houses that sat abandoned, gutted and ransacked, contents scattered across lawns, porches torn apart, roofs caving in. Corpses, slumped at storefronts, piled on sidewalks, dismembered, blood staining concrete, the smell of rotting bodies and stewing sewage penetrating even our closed windows.  
  
A cat pawing at an overturned trashcan turned tail and ran when our car neared. I parked in an empty alleyway, afraid that the deeper in we drove, the harder it would be to get through by car. So we got out and started walking, collars pulled over noses to keep from gagging, Castiel unaffected and leading us through the pitch black.  
  
The light was so close now, maybe a mile away. I could see the sky, barely a sliver at that angle, the smallest line of blue, blue like skies should be, blue with swirling cotton clouds, blue like the clearest waters, rippling with life, blue like happiness and smiles. The excitement tingled in my fingertips and I couldn't keep from crying.  
  
The sun has freed us finally.  
  
I didn't matter how many pools of still warm blood I stepped in, how many stiff bodies I tripped over, I was going to see the sun again.  
  
We heard it before we saw it.  
  
Screaming.  
  
An earth-quake of noise, first a rumble, then a roar, growing with each step forward. We were running, part curiosity, part need, feet pounding the pavement, but you couldn't hear it over the storm.  
  
The freezing air burned my lungs, heaving breaths stinging my lips. All I could see was the light, cresting over the tops of buildings, the end of an impossible maze of alleyways and cluttered streets, and the screaming.  
  
It was so loud now, separate voices, hundreds of animals, fighting to the death, an eternal cage match. It was like the girl in the forest but times a million. It made my skin crawl, heart pumping impossibly fast, fear fizzling in my veins, but I kept moving forward.  
  
The first thing we saw when we turned the last corner was a woman, old and crippled, shuffling forward, one hand raised, one hand clutched to her chest.  
  
"God has come to save us!" She gargled as we passed. "The Rapture is here! He is taking us to heaven! He has risen!"  
  
A crowd stood ahead, a tightly packed mass of bodies at the mouth of the road, furiously trying to press forward into the space before them, so dense that I couldn't see over the sea of bobbing heads to get a peek of what they were looking at. The voices were vibrating my ear drums, rattling my brain. Screeching and shrieking, like caged monkeys set on fire, the sound you imagined the Earth would make if you tore it apart straight down the middle  
  
The light was just in front of us, beaming down from the hole in the sky straight into what seemed to be a court yard, a large space clear of buildings but full of people.  
  
They were every where. Beating others to the ground so they can move a step forward. Climbing on top of buildings to get closer, pushing others off that got in their way. Swinging guns and sticks and fists to those that tried to push ahead of them. Gun barrels were emptied into bodies, screams of anguish sounding as those shot collapsed to the ground, agony ripping from their throats as they were trampled into the pavement.  
  
Complete and utter chaos.  
  
A hand was on my arm and suddenly I was high above it all, perched on top of a tall building no one else had accessed. My head snapped back to see Castiel gripping my arm tight, Sam beside him, hand over his mouth as he stared silently down at the scene with a look of complete shock on his face.  
  
The ground was a writhing mass below us, a sea of movement, basked in the light of the sun.  
  
I had almost forgotten what color looked like. Pale faces, smudged with dirt, lips blue from cold, torn clothes of green, blue, pink, purple, orange, yellow shades, stained. Red. Blood on everything, coating heads and splattered on clothing, dripping from walls and pooling on concrete.  
  
Faces were turned up to the light, hands reaching to the sky, voices ringing out, pleas for a savior, pleas for forgiveness, pleas for death. Eyes closed and peaceful, mouths open and screaming to the stars. Everyone was desperate to get to the light, to get to heaven, to get to safety. I could see the hope glowing on their pale faces, shining in the whites of their eyes, cracking in their relieved smiles as they crushed the bones of the bodies beneath them so they could be just an inch closer to the sky.  
  
The light was just a foot away from the edge of the roof. If I just stuck my arm out, I could reach it-  
  
The door behind us banged open, a man bounding onto roof at full speed, barely taking a notice to us before he flung himself over the edge, hands reaching forward as if he could grasp the sunlight between his fingers.  
  
Sam was on his hands and knees, vomiting up the breakfast we never had. I wasn't breathing. My heart had stopped beating. My eyes had stopped seeing. Everything blurred together and all I could see was hell. Cas's hand fell from my arm in favor of his turning around, unable to face what the world had become. Humans were not humans. They were rats, crazed and starving, a single piece of food hung just out of their reach. They were animals, hysterical, raging, hungry animals, humanity cracked upon its fragile seam, fractured and fleshed out for all to see.  
  
All there was was screaming as the world fell apart, a 10.0 earthquake rattling the Earth into a million and I couldn't stand up. A fire was raging the distance and the world was burning and I was falling and no hands were there to catch me. The air was poisoned, tainted with the breaths of the monsters below me. My hands were shaking as they met my cheeks, frigid fingers scraping up the sides of my head and grasping at my hair. I could hear Sam sobbing beside me, asking no one and everyone how this could possibly be real, begging for it to all be a horrible nightmare.  
  
I remember stretching out my fingers and feeling the sun on the very tips of them. I remember Sam kneeling at the edge with his hands held incredulous on the sides of his skull, eyes watering and mouth hanging open, silent, unable to speak another word. I remember Cas standing at my back, still as a statue. I remember my head banging against his knee as I broke and he did nothing, rendered unable to function.  
  
I don't know how long we sat there, but when I looked up I could see the stars.  
  
I don't remember Cas grabbing my arm once again. I don't remember him flashing us back into the car. I don't remember starting up the engine and speeding out of there.  
  
I do remember someone jumping on the hood and busting out the windshield with the butt of a gun. I do remember Sam shooting at him until finally let go, sliding off and tumbling under the wheels, sending us flying up into the air and slamming back down again. I remember seeing the black ooze that leaked from his ears, splattering from his mouth as he screamed at us. I remember the wheels skidding as I pressed the accelerator to the floor, fingers gripping the wheel, knuckles white and stained with drops of black blood.  
  
I remember watching as the light grew farther away in the rearview mirror.


	6. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.

* * *

**_Dean Winchester sat on a wall_ ** ****  
**_Dean Winchester had a great fall_ ** ****  
**_All of God's angels_ ** ****  
**_And all of God's men_ ** **_  
_ ** ******_Couldn't put Dean back together again_**

* * *

  **CHAPTER 6- ASHES, ASHES, WE ALL FALL DOWN**

* * *

The light was gone within an hour.  
  
It was like it just wanted to say hello and tear the world apart. Stay for a cup of tea while the bodies piled up and wave a happy goodbye when the screams finally died out.  
  
It was like an eye, Sam said, Darkness closing in until it was no more. Nothing more than the stars that stained our memories or the hope that things might finally get better.  
  
The car was more silent than ever. Less like an absence of sound and more like an absence of everything, as if we had been sucked into the vacuum of space and all our thoughts and words had died along with us. I was barely aware of my hands on the wheel, or my constant checking of the rearview mirror, or the way the freezing air rushed into car through the shattered window. I wasn't aware that I was still breathing or that my heart was still pumping or that I still was pressing my foot to the pedal because all I could see were the faces. The faces of all those people-monsters-so far from being human but so close to being something we would have hunted back when that was all that mattered. So close that I almost couldn't tell the difference. So close that I was afraid that I could be one of them.  
  
I could still feel the sunlight on my fingertips. It felt like tired morning kisses on my skin, warm like my mother's hands when they would caress my face as she sang me to sleep. It felt like holding your hand just above a flame, burning, but in an adrenaline-pumping way, knowing that you are moments away from pain but you have all the control. It felt like the first time you ever realize that you love someone, all flush and tingly and completely indescribable. It made me sick.  
  
It was like a tattoo of someone's name whom you loved, who you shared your favorite memories with, who you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, but they died before you could even say goodbye. All I wanted was to go back, rewind time so I could fight my way to the middle of that crowd and feel the sun once again. It was an ache in my chest, the need to see it one more time, the knowledge that I would crush anyone in my way to get there a weight in my stomach. I couldn't push down the feeling, I couldn't get rid of it. It was all-consuming and completely terrifying.  
  
I hadn't realized that Sam had leaned over the back seat but I almost crashed when I heard a scream. There was a moment when the car was skidding sideways and all there was was bobbing lights and high-pitched screeching and Sam's panicked consoling and my confused and distressed questions as I scrambled to gain purchase on the asphalt.  
  
We came to a stop as the back end slammed into another car, sending my head cracking against the window and Sam sprawling into my side. The screaming continued, my head pounding like a drum and all I could see was the shine of the headlights on the car in front of us as my vision blurred in and out.  
  
"Hey, hey, calm down. It's okay," Sam whispered, voice shaking on the edge of calm. I turned to see his head dipped over the back of the seat, hands raised, palm-out at the sides of his face as if in surrender. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."  
  
"What the hell is it?" I slurred, fingers poking at the knot on my head and the probable concussion that was like a drill to my skull.  
  
"Shhhh!" Sam threw a halting hand at my face without even a glance, focus still turned to the back seat. I could hear quiet whimpers and stifled sniffles as Sam continued to whisper words of comfort. When I tried to get up to see what it was, Sam's hand was on my shoulder, pushing me back down.  
  
"Hey, calm down. Everything is going to be okay. You are safe now, you hear me?" There was a small mumble in response. "Come here. Is it okay if I bring you up here?" Another mumble.  
  
Sam reached behind the back seat slowly, repeating the mantra of "It's okay" the whole time, and I swear the whole world was holding its breath as he came back up, time seeming to slow down as he turned around.  
  
He was holding a girl, tiny and trembling, like a chihuahua, curled so tightly into herself that I could barely see her face but she appeared to be barely six years old. Sam placed her onto the seat beside him, but she took one look at me and scrambled into his lap, cries growing louder again as her shining eyes looked up at me in fear, too thin arms wrapping around her too thin legs as she hid behind Sam's arm. It took another eternity of hastily calming her down before she stopped crying altogether and just shivered silently on Sam's lap, staring down at the seat.  
  
"Hey." He hesitantly placed his hand on her back. "I'm Sam," he pointed to me, "that's Dean, my big brother," then to Cas, "and that's our friend Cas. We are all nice and we will not hurt you. You are safe with us."  
  
She turned her wide eyes to him, pausing a moment before nodding minutely.  
  
"Good. What's your name?" I could see the gentle smile on his face, hear the tender tone in his voice, so different than the broken sobs that filled his mouth just hours earlier, the intense silence that followed. I almost wanted to fall into his false calm and pretend that the last hours never happened, I wanted to believe his words, believe that everything was alright, but there were no amount of lies and denial that could take away the fact that I had watched the world fall to pieces with my own eyes, felt it crumple with every bit of my being, let my last bits of hope slip through my fingers and fall into the endless pit of death that had roared beneath me.  
  
She was so quiet, I couldn't hear her answer. Sam had to lean his head down to hear her, her mouth pressed to his ear like they were sharing secrets.  
  
"Haleigh? That's a beautiful name." He grinned down at her, something of a magic act, impossible in this world that we were trapped in, as if we were not stuck on a road in the middle of nowhere, as if the sun had not just stopped rising months ago, as if the sky had not been swallowed up, as if the world wasn't dying, as if we were not slowly dying along with it.  
  
"Where are you from?" He brushed a hand over her ratty hair, smoothing it down.  
  
"Nebraska," she squeaked.  
  
"Nebraska? How did you get all the way over here?"  
  
"T-the men. The men, they took me," she stuttered, scared stiff as she shook her head furiously, arms wrapping around herself even more tightly.  
  
The smile fell from Sam's face and he looked up at me for what felt like the first time in a thousand years. "Dean, turn the heater on."  
  
I didn't question him, seeing as the girl was shivering her way out of her skin, going back on the vow that we would not use the heaters in an attempt to save gas as I flipped them on, the car instantly flooded with stuffy, charred-smelling air. It was like a luxury, simple warmth, something that I had never thought of as much of problem just months before, the ability to just flip a switch and not be cold anymore. It wouldn't make much of a difference when we started driving again, though.  
  
Sam shrugged off his outermost coat and draped it around her, hurriedly angling all the vents on her, Cas leaning forward and speaking for the first time since we left.  
  
"She has a fever. Do you want me to heal her?"  
  
"No," Sam snapped, brushing off his extended hand. "No, not now. Wait until she's asleep or something."  
  
I just sat, watching, mouth dry and hands clenched in my jeans. I still hadn't completely taken hold of the situation, mind swimming and head spinning. All I could focus on was the way Sam cradled the girl, Haleigh, in his arms so gently, his words so caring and eyes so serene. It wasn't him. It was so unlike the Sam I knew, that I had come to know since the Darkness had taken over. There in the seat next to me was before Sam, pre-apocalypse, pre-Darkness, pre-everything. That was the Sam that stayed up reading Harry Potter and curled up on the couch to do homework on weekends. That was the Sam who once saved a kitten from behind a motel and let it sleep in his coat pocket until Dad made him get rid of it. That was the Sam that helped me with my homework and defended bullied kids at school. That was the Sam who never once complained and only offered smiles when you could see he was breaking inside. That was the Sam that was only held together by rusty paper clips but would never hesitate to offer them to others who needed them. That was the Sam that I hadn't seen in years, that had been slowly worn down piece by piece until he was left with nothing, nothing to live for. That was the Sam I missed every time I looked into his eyes and saw someone who did not want to be here, who would give anything to finally be free from this life he was forced to live in.  
  
My hands found their way back to the wheel, my foot pressing to the pedal, and we were moving again. The road signs meant nothing more than land marks, the exits they pointed out leading to cities and towns empty and starved of life, void of the hustle and bustle of days long past, their sidewalks walked by shadows, streets home to skeletons of abandoned cars and rotting trash, houses inhabited by silhouettes in widows that ducked and hid when you looked at them. Every town is a ghost town when the people who live there haunt the place like the dead.  
  
My eyes stayed on the road but every so often I looked over to see Haleigh's head tucked in Sam's coat, find him grasping her bare feet in his large hands to keep her from getting frostbite, see her eyes close in sleep only to snap open a moment later, startled. I held my breath the whole way home, dread a slithering snake in my stomach, knowing that we were getting ourselves into some deep trouble, trying not to dwell on thoughts of the future because that was a dark path that had no clear end.  
  
The road home was paved with silence.  
  
The Bunker was as cold as ever, the fires burnt out long ago, embers barely glowing in the ashes. Cas went about to lighting each one again, running past me with a stack of chopped wood piled in his arms. Sam strode in with Haleigh in his arms, head drooping on his shoulder, barely a form inside the bundle of fabric. He immediately plopped down in front of the fire Cas had just lit, wrapping the girl more tightly in his coat. I was left standing dumbstruck at the bottom of the staircase, feet glued to the ground and mouth hanging open until I remembered that there was dead body in the next room over. Cas helped me move it into one of the back rooms so the girl wouldn't see it, mopping up the black blood that had formed a pool around the counter. It took me half an hour to scrub all the traces of it off my skin, rubbing my hands raw long after it had all washed away. I left the bathroom with knuckles stained with my own blood, skin still crawling and stomach still churning.  
  
Cas cured the girl of her fever while she lay curled peacefully in Sam's lap, holding onto Sam's arm like it was some kind of teddy bear she couldn't sleep without. I kept moving, going from cleaning the kitchen to reorganizing my room to chopping wood without a single break to think. I didn't want to think. Work gave me an excuse to pretend like nothing happened, push the images out of my head and erase the screams from my memories. No one said a thing. Sam was too preoccupied with the girl to make a comment, and Cas avoided any form of eye contact each time we crossed paths.  
  
The girl ended up sleeping for hours. Cas must have done something to aid her of nightmares, because she barely even stirred. I found every possible distraction I could. I cleaned all of our clothes, which was highly needed, considering the fact that I had been wearing the same three shirts for the past few months without washing them once. I swept all the floors-God, I missed vacuums-and mopped them too, though it didn't really matter anymore. I cleaned all the dirty dishes that had been piling up for days (washing things isn't easy when your only source of water is the stream behind the Bunker), and even put all the books we had left out back on the shelves according to Sam's weird Da Vinci code thing. All while Cas moped all alone in the library and Sam snoozed by the fire place. (He had dozed off in the middle of my crazed sweeping binge.)  
  
And just when I felt like I was going to collapse myself, the girl sat up and looked around, freezing in place when her eyes fell on me, jumping up and running for the door screaming for her Mommy. Sam wasn't even fully awake before he stumbled to his feet and chased after her, which isn't the best idea when trying to comfort a scared girl, stopping her in her tracks and dropping in front of her. She fell into his arms in a heartbeat, a shaking and sobbing mess, Sam picking her up and wiping her tears away. I couldn't hear what he was whispering to her, but at one point she looked over his shoulder at me and nodded, turning back to him once more.  
  
Sam gathered up some blankets and made her a bed near the fire and laid her there, telling her to stay there while he went to talk to us. We stood in the war room, gathered around the table, none taking the move to sit. For a moment, no one said a thing, eyes catching on chairs and books and candles, looking anywhere but up. I couldn't get my mouth to move, lips glued shut by the panic that had been a hive of buzzing hornets in my chest, afraid that if I even spoke a word, it would all just escape and I wouldn't be able to stop myself.  
  
"She said that you look like one of the men, Dean."  
  
Sam was looking straight at me, hands gripping the back of the chair in front of him, eyes expectant, cheeks hollow, hair a mess, shoulders slumped.  
  
"The men that took her. Took her from her home when the lights went out and locked her up and did things to her that she won't even talk about."  
  
My fingers gripped the edge of the table tighter. I swallowed hard. "She...she said that?"  
  
"Yes." His voice cracked.  
  
My eyes were too heavy to hold up, falling back to the table bathed in orange candle light and stained with rings in the shape of glass bottoms.  
  
He leaned forward, hands pressed flat against the table top, voice low as he stabbed me with his eyes and I still couldn't bear to look up.  
  
"Now, Dean, before you say anything about 'this is not our responsibility', or 'we already have too much on our plate', just think about that girl in there. She hasn't seen her family in months. She doesn't even know if they are alive or not. She was just taken one night from her own home, in the middle of all this panic, and locked up for who knows how long, and had unspeakable things done to her that will probably scar her for the rest of her life. She is lost, Dean. She is lost and alone and we are the only ones-"  
  
"Sam..."  
  
"This is the apocalypse, Dean! We can't just shove all of our problems on other people. There is no one else! Everyone we know is dead. Everyone else is gone, man. You know that! We are so far gone from what the world used to be. There are no nice little white-picket families that we can hand her off to. We can't trust anybody! Everyone is just living for themselves. That's what people do. It's survival of the fittest out there, and no one wants to take on the burden of another mouth to feed, another life to defend."  
  
"Then why do we have to do it?" I questioned, knuckles going white as I tried to keep my voice from shaking. It was all too much. It was all too much for me.  
  
"Because that's what we do, Dean!" His hand slamming down on the table is what finally forced me to look up. The force seemed to shake the whole room, the intensity of his stare, the accusation in his voice, the pure rage barely hiding the complete and utter panic in his eyes that only I know how to see. It all plunged us into a bitter, detached silence as the moment froze in time, a staring match growing between the two of us, Castiel off to the side, watching everything go down.  
  
"That's what we do," Sam repeated quietly, his voice growing with the next line. "It's our job to save people, take on the jobs no one else would. We have done this all our life. It's not that different."  
  
"Sam..." I whispered once again, worlds alluding my jumbled thoughts as I tried to form a proper counter-argument.  
  
"Dean, there's no convincing. We have to do this." He looked over his shoulder to the doorway, gazing at the girl's silhouette framed by the fire where she sat alone, probably listening to our every word. "There's no other choice. So you better suck it up and accept it, because we can't do anything about it." He snapped before he pushed himself off of the table with a huff and strode off.  
  
I was stuck in that spot for what felt like hours, staring blankly off at the door which he left through, feeling more helpless and alone than ever.  
  
I turned to meet Cas's eyes, pleading silently for him to give me some kind of support, reassurence, to say that he was on my side, anything, but he just gave me a small nod before following Sam out without a second glance.  
  
It was all too much.  
  
It was all too much.  
  
I waited until I knew Sam was asleep at the fireplace with Haleigh curled up at his side, even sitting and listening to see if he was snoring. With a beer and lantern in hand, I slipped out silently, feet following the rocky path up the hill and past the Bunker. It was so quiet that I could hear my heart beating in my chest, each piece of gravel scrape against the bottoms of my boots. The lantern casted a warm glow over the worn path, only making the shadows deeper and the pebbles sharper. The difference between my world and the endless Darkness was a dim circle of light that bobbed and moved with each step. My breath clogged the air, thick and wispy like cigarette smoke. The hill seemed to grow steeper with each step, the trek taking longer than I remembered. I felt like I was climbing a mountain, out of breath and hanging on to the thought of getting to the top, crossing the finish line, reaching the end, getting to stop, finally.  
  
I picked a spot and settled onto the dry dirt, where grass used to grow, where bright yellow buttercups would bloom in the spring, where glistening snow would cover in the winter, where I always said I would come and sit for a picnic or something, because it just seemed so perfect. The lantern was my only companion, no plaid blankets or baskets full of fruits and flowers to accompany me. My beer was cold, cold as the ground I sat on, cold as air that pressed on my cheeks, seeped through every layer of my clothing and caressed my skin, making me shiver.  
  
I could see the oranges and golds of flames in the windows of the Bunker, seeming almost like sparkling stars in the distance, twinkling and just a breath away, but so far out of reach at the same time. My elbows rested on my knees as I took a sip of the beer, probably the last beer, watching the lights flicker and dance to a tune I could not hear. Being up there, it felt like I was floating, the world gone completely, stomach dropping like I was falling endlessly into the void below. That was all the world was now, a never-ending pit of nothing. Take one step off the edge and you would fall forever, plummeting down to the end that didn't exist.  
  
There was the unmistakable sound of wings flapping and I could see the tips of Cas's shoes peeking out from behind me. My fingers dragged through the rough dirt as my eyes stayed glued to the lamp, to the small trapped flame that was the only thing keeping the Darkness from swallowing me whole.  
  
"What? Are you just gonna stand and stare? Take a seat, come watch the show with me."  
  
He lowered himself down beside me without a word, crossing his legs and looking out over the great expanse of nothing spanning in front of us. I offered him the bottle, and he took it after a moment's hesitation, tipping it back and sipping it before handing it back to me. His eyes were stuck on the wavering lights in the windows, just as mine had been a moment before. I wonder if he was thinking of stars then too.  
  
He didn't speak for a long time, the two of us just sitting on the crest of the hill alone in the middle of everywhere, a lonely island hovering in the endless void of space, the scary part, on the very edge of a black hole, where everything was sucked in, even light, and everything stopped existing, and there was nothing left to hold on to stop you from getting sucked in too. It was quiet, so quiet that if I held my breath I could hear the Darkness faintly in the distance. That sound that had grown to be part of the silence as well, because it was always there and you eventually just tuned it out. The sound of utter emptiness, how you would imagine space would sound like, even though there is no air for sound to travel through. Almost like the sound of pouring rain outside your window in the middle of spring, low and rumbling and pounding the earth, making your bones rattle, your chest heavy, making it hard to breath.  
  
"Are you okay?"  
  
His voice was quiet, so loud, though, against the silence. His head cocked to the side as he looked at me, chin resting on his shoulder.  
  
I sighed and took another sip of my drink to prolong the pause. The bottle clinked against rocks under me when I set it down, holding my breath as I fiddled with the label, head hanging low so I wouldn't have to see Cas staring at me with those eyes, always so in awe of me like I was some kind of idol, like I was the 'righteous man'. Saving the world doesn't make you a good person if you end up plunging it into the end again.  
  
I sighed again. It had become such a normal thing to do. "No."  
  
"Is it because of the girl? Do you not want to take her in?" It doesn't matter how much of an angel he is, he has always been one of the most understanding and caring people I have ever met.  
  
"Well, kind of." I passed the bottle back to him and waited for him to take a drink. "Listen, I don't mean to be all against her being here. I definitely don't want her out there with freaks like we saw in that city running around. It's just... with everything that has happened in the past few hours, this just tips the scale. I can't deal with it all at once. I haven't had a single moment to process it all. We just went from one thing to the next without a breath in-between. I feel like my head is about explode with all the shit that we just went through."  
  
"It is okay, Dean. Most humans do not have the mental strength to go through all that. Even I am having trouble processing everything that I have witnessed." He shook his head wearily and looked back to the bunker, eyes glowing in the dim light of the lamp. "Even you, Dean, cannot handle the weight of the world. Eventually, there will be one event that will be the stick that breaks the camel's back." He turned back to me, eyebrows scrunched together, a small smile on his face. "That is how the saying goes, isn't it?"  
  
Something warm grew in my chest and I laughed, just a bit, but it was a laugh all the same. "Yeah, close enough." I can't remember the last time I really laughed.  
  
He passed the beer back to me. "I think that we all need to just take a break. No more researching, no more stress. It is too hard on us."  
  
"Yeah, I can agree with you there. I need a vacation."  
  
"I do not think that is possible, Dean."  
  
I laughed again, taking another sip of beer before looking back at him. "Nah, I was thinking that we just ditch the apocalypse and go have some fun. Where do you want to go? I think the beach sounds nice."  
  
He realized the sarcasm, grinning and pulling his legs up to his chest, resting his chin on his knees. "I have heard of amusement parks and things called roller-coasters that humans ride just to get sick."  
  
"Well, that's not their intended purpose, but I hear that they are pretty fun. I have been to amusement parks before, but I never ridden any of the rides." The beer bottle wasn't growing warmer to my touch like usual, instead staying ice cold no matter how long I held it, chilling my fingers even more than the frigid air was. I set the bottle down between us and tucked my hands into my pockets, wishing that I had thought to bring some gloves. "Would you want to go to an amusement park?"  
  
"Yes, actually. I have always wondered what was so amusing about paying to put your life in danger."  
  
I nodded, a grin growing on my cold cheeks. "Well, when this is all over, I say we take a trip to the nearest amusement park and get on every single ride. Sound nice?"  
  
His eyes widened in something between wonder and surprise. "When the apocalypse is over?"  
  
I nodded again.  
  
He smiled so wide that I could see his teeth. "Yes, Dean, I think that is a great idea. I would love that."  
  
"Great. It's a plan. Step one, bag the Darkness, step two, have the greatest vacation ever."  
  
"Ride the biggest roller-coaster on Earth," he added.  
  
"Yeah, and after, we should go to the beach, learn to surf and stuff."  
  
"The beach sounds nice."  
  
"Yeah, the beach sounds great."


	7. I Was Taught to Fear the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a tale about the end of the world. From the moment the Darkness was set free upon the Earth to the bitter last breaths of the few survivors left. In between are disturbing horrors no person should know. But these stories need to be told.

* * *

**_Mr. Moon and Mrs. Sun dance across the sky_ ** ****  
**_Midday waltzing, a constant tango_ ** ****  
**_Red sea rising, stars fading into centerfolds_ ** ****  
**_Orange bulb dimming, diamond heart shining_ ** ****  
**_Day and night conversing_ ** ****  
**_Speaking words into the clouds_ ** ****  
**_Rays crawling ever closer_ ** ****  
**_Two lovers just out of reach_ ** ****  
**_Cresting crystal mountaintops_ ** ****  
**_Breathing in the sea_ ** ****  
**_Set on each horizon_ ** **_  
_ ** ******_Two eyes watching over me._**

* * *

  **CHAPTER 7- I WAS TAUGHT TO FEAR THE DARK**

* * *

 My mother used to sing me to sleep when I got scared at night.  
  
Not a lullaby. No. It was always that Beatles song, Hey Jude. I remember the way she would whisper it as she tucked me back into bed after I would come bounding into their room crying about the monster in the closet, the shadows that whispered my name every time I closed my eyes. I never understood the words, but her voice always comforted me, the way she was so gentle and caring, the way she smiled, the way she would assure me each time that there was no monster, no danger. She always told me that the angels were watching over me, that they would protect me from all the big bad monsters in my closet and the shadows that lurked in the corners. And I always believed her.  
  
When I stepped in the bunker, it took me a while to realize, but I could hear the same tune, the same one my mother always sang to me, and I stopped.  
  
It was Sam. Sam was in the library with the girl cradled on his shoulder, humming the song hurriedly to himself as he bounced her in his arms, and all I could do was wonder how the hell he even knew that song because Dad sure as hell never let us listen to the Beatles after Mom died. I didn't move, didn't notice Cas walking past me, didn't realize that I had let go of the door until it came slamming shut behind me and we all jumped out of our skin.  
  
The girl's face was pale in the firelight as her head popped up from its place in the crook of Sam's neck. Her look of fear and confusion was marred by the tears that glistened on her cheeks and her sniffles that made her whole body shake. I hadn't realized that the song had stopped, that the room was plagued in a stale silence as we all looked back and forth between each other, waiting for the others to say something, something at all. It wasn't until the crushing weight of everything settled back on my shoulders did I remember that everything was still here, same as it was when I left, that it wasn't all a bad dream that I could black out, erase from memory. Leaving only evaded the responsibility, the pressure, the overwhelming feeling that I was drowning every second that I stood in this empty shell of a building. My little siesta was over, I left it at the door when I walked in. But it didn't matter how long I ran from my problems, they were always nipping at my heels, looming over my shoulder, heavy and smothering, not unlike the Darkness that clogged the sky and stole the sun away.  
  
"Where were you?" Sam snapped, eyes focused on me, his tone accusing but kept to a whisper as he stroked the girl's hair in an attempt to calm her down. I didn't miss the panic that hid behind his words, that was almost a constant presence in every conversation.  
  
"We were sitting on the hill outside," Cas answered for me. I didn't even hear the question.  
  
"What? Why the hell were you out there? I needed you in here." His words were screaming, but his voice was only a harsh breeze to the still air. The thoughts echoing against my skull threatened to overpower it, but somehow his message rang clear.  
  
"Why? What happened?" It was like a switch flipped inside me. I was in panic mode, leeching off of Sam's trepidation bubbling under the surface. I needed you. The words bumped around in my head along with all of my previous worries, and soon, they were all I could hear, over and over and over and over. He was in trouble and I wasn't there to help him. I was off talking of vacations and rollercoasters and the fucking beach while he was here, alone, wondering where I was and why I had left him.  
  
He looked to the girl for a moment before lowering his voice even more. "She had another nightmare. It must have been a bad one, because it took me half an hour to calm her down. She wouldn't even let me touch her at first. She hid under the table and I couldn't get her to come out."  
  
I didn't know what to say.  
  
"I was going to prepare a bath for her, maybe get her some food soon. She must be hungry."  
  
It took me a moment to realize what he was saying, but I quickly nodded my head and ran off to the kitchen, waving for Cas to follow.  
  
Taking a bath was a big ordeal these days.  
  
Well, at least for us, we were lucky enough to have a fresh stream running just a few meters from our front doorstep. The water had stopped running from the taps long ago. We had figured that there was a water pump somewhere in the bunker that probably had some extra water sitting in it, but it must have been buried somewhere among the endless sprawling hallways and hidden rooms, because we couldn't find it. So we started using water from the stream. But using it for anything more than a quick drink meant that we had to lug out the huge chili pots that we found in the kitchen and fill them up to the brim, and then make the long walk back to the bunker, which was a two man job, unless Cas came along to help. After that, we had to heat the ice cold water over the fire (oh yeah, the gas just happened to stop working too) until it was actually at a tolerable temperature to bathe in. Then came the precarious task of trying to get the pot from the fire to the bathroom without singeing your fucking fingers off (I lost count of how many times I had burnt myself doing that until I finally thought to let it cool down some first). All of the work put into it made me miss being able to take a nice, quick shower.  
  
It took quite a while, but we got the bath ready. The whole time, I was so determined to contribute, to make up for the pit of guilt that had settled in my stomach. In reality, it was a small offence, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it all just got blown out of proportion for me somehow. I couldn't stand the thought of Sam being woken up to the girl's screams, of him crouching by the table and trying desperately to coax her out, grimacing every time she flinched away from his helping hand. All while I wasn't there to help him.  
  
I sat in the library as Sam tried to get Haleigh into the bath. I could hear them, just down the hall. I held my breath and stared at the flickering shadows in the hallway as she cried. Cried about her Mommy, cried about her old house, cried as she told Sam to get out get out get out.  
  
Sam ended up having to leave her alone. She refused to get in the bath while he was in the room. Even after he tried to convince her that there was a fine line between helping and hurting, she still did not trust him. The men, she said, the men hurt her. They took her clothes when she begged for them not to, they did things Mommy said no one should ever do to little girls like her.  
  
Sam settled on making sure that she knew where everything was and left the door open a crack so she could call to him when she was done or if she needed help. He emerged from the bathroom with misery dripping from his features, and I could see his face fall when he saw me sitting there even through the dark shadows. Our eyes connected and I could tell that he knew, he knew that I had heard every word, and that they made me just as sick as they did him.  
  
He slid down into the chair beside mine with a loud shaking sigh, burying his head in his hands. I had my fingers clasped together and pressed tightly against my lips, as if I was afraid of what might come tumbling out of my mouth if I removed them.  
  
We sat like that for what seemed like hours, not moving, not saying a word, just listening to the water splash in the bathroom three doors over. The only time I looked up from the table was when Castiel walked in, having been who knows where for the past few minutes and was graced with the fact that he did not hear that little girl's cries, didn't have to hear her utter the worst words you could possibly imagine.  
  
"Where is the girl? Is she alright?"  
  
Neither Sam nor I made a move to answer. I stared off into the shadows that crept along the bookshelves, trying to ignore the figures I saw lurking there, fingers curling around corners, faces peeking between volumes, eyes blinking from the niches where the light did not reach. I watched my breath swirl and cloud the air, counted the scars that lined my fingers, prayed and prayed for the screams in my head go away.  
  
"Maybe... maybe you can erase her memories."  
  
My eyes shot up to meet the broken look of hope on Sam's face as he turned to Cas. I held my breath as I turned to him as well, trying to not look as desperate as my brother.  
  
"Are you speaking of the ones of her-"  
  
"-Yes. Yes, Cas. We do not need to talk about them. I just want to know if you can erase them," Sam said.  
  
He paused for a moment, head tilting to the side in that annoying way that really didn't even annoy me all that much anymore because bigger things mattered then than being ticked off by the strange mannerisms of a rebellious angel. "Well, yes, I can. But it would not make much of a difference. Memories are merely just the mind's visual playback of an event. The emotions related to that are completely separate, and are part of the soul, not the mind. I cannot erase part of a soul."  
  
All of the air left my lungs. I couldn't stop my shoulders from slumping, my head from dipping into my hands like a weeping willow, wilted and sorrowed, wishing with all of my heart that I could take the burdens from that little girl myself, with my own bare hands. No one deserved that, no one, especially not a lost and lonely girl who was barely six years old and missed her family, who didn't know if her parents were still alive or not, who had nothing left but the nightmares of memories carved into her soul and the scars and bruises scraped into her skin.  
  
I can't help but understand her pain.  
  
"I am going to kill them."  
  
"What?"  
  
I lifted my head up, mouth a tight line and eyes set straight, voice nothing more than an animal-like growl. "I am going to kill them."  
  
"Who?" Sam asked.  
  
"I am going to kill each and every one of those sons of bitches that laid even a finger on her!"  
  
The room went silent. My chair was five feet behind me, my fist bared on the table top. The room was still shaking. Sam and Cas only stared, eyes wide, mouths open. The candle's flames were shivering, as if terrified of my voice and the way it tore holes through the fragile silence and left it a shredded rag that let the whispers through, the ones that hide right in the corners of your mind, the ones you swear are just the wind, even though wind no longer exists in this world; the ones that plague your sleep and dig into the deepest crevasses of your mind, making a home there and living off your thoughts like parasites. The ones that I hope are just temporary but book their stay for another night with each experience that rips away at the seams that hold together my sanity.  
  
A small sniffle came from the hallway and I snapped around to see Haleigh there, towel wrapped around her thin shoulders, pooling on the ground beneath her, hair still soaked and dripping a puddle at her feet. Her chin was tucked to her chest, wide eyes glancing shyly up at us.  
  
"I'm done."  
  
Sam was up in a second, scooping her up into his arms and running her over to the fire place, scolding her all along the way for walking all the way out here while her hair was still wet, going on about how she could get pneumonia, how it was not so easy to treat illnesses anymore, and so on. I was still stuck in the same place as he got up to get another towel, and she turned around with a stern look on her face and stopped him in his tracks.  
  
"No. My Mommy would always dry my hair after I took a bath and braid it in pretty pigtails."  
  
Sam looked at me in half disbelief/half desperation, lifting his hands up in question, eyebrows creasing in confusion.  
  
I just shrugged in equal ignorance, giving him a sympathetic look. "Well, you're the one with the hair, you should know how to braid." The smile on my face was stiff like plastic, forced and molded by my own hands, attempting to pretend that everything was fine, everything was perfect, and that we still lived in a world that it was possible to truly smile in.  
  
I was sitting on the table top, fingers wrapped around an empty beer bottle that I had found on the floor. I was going to throw it away, but I couldn't help but feel the familiarity of its weight in my palms, the cool glass on my fingertips. We had just run out and I was already getting all sentimental. The trip to the trashcan was stopped midway, interrupted by the quiet giggling that shocked my ears and made my head buzz in confusion.  
  
My feet had made their own way to the library, stopping in the doorway to gaze upon the scene by the fire, three shadows gathered there, huddled close like cold penguins, all laughing and chattering merrily.  
  
Cas and Sam were braiding Haleigh's hair, Cas some kind of hair-styling prodigy, easily twisting one side of her hair together and already tying it at the end, all while he tried to explain to Sam how to do it on the other side. Sam was failing miserably, but joking along the way, going on about how he should learn how to braid his own hair so he could get it out of his face for once.  
  
And I sat and watched them from my home in the shadows, silent like the Darkness, hidden and observing the happy sight before me, the icy spear in my chest only growing colder as my fingers gripped the empty bottle tighter, and I couldn't bear to look any longer.  
  
"My best friend's name was Emma." I could hear the smile in Haleigh's voice, the warmest I had heard it since we had found her. "We always swinged on the swings together at recess. She would share her gummies with me sometimes, and I would give her one of my cookies my Mommy packed me. We were gonna have a sleepover at my house on the weekend. We were planning it at school the day before the lights went out. We were gonna have ordered pizza and play dress up and watch a movie. It was gonna be really fun."  
  
I squeezed my eyes shut. That was what always got me. The memories of before. They stabbed my brain like the tip of a dagger, bled out and bloomed like an open wound. I could never stop them from coming, seeping between my clutched fingers, dripping from my palms, overflowing like flood water. Flashes of Sam laughing, of music blaring from the Impala's speakers, wind rushing past my face through the open window. Bars and diners, sleazy motels, Sam's snoring, the open road, the smell of rain, the constellations that had names that I never learned. My hands, palms up, shaking and covered in blood, that unending rage that ripped through me, bubbled under my skin, Cas below me, face battered and blood-stained, angel blade stabbing the wood just inches from his face-  
  
That's where the memories always went. They started with warm smiles and the echoes of laughter long forgotten, then were quickly torn apart by the horrors that I thought had been washed away years ago by liquor and forced forgetfulness.  
  
The problem was that there were too many. The bad always outweighed the good. There was no amount of forgetting that could erase every bad memory, every horrifying experience, because that was my life. From the moment that demon burnt my Mom up on that ceiling, that has been my life. There's no getting away from that. There was no forgetting.  
  
Things only get more soul-wrenching, more scarring. They all pile up and up and there is no ceiling to stop them. No small recollection of a tiny victory or a good joke here and there can ever wipe them out. My life is like a giant pie chart where the dark and twisted memories leave a stain so large that only the tiniest sliver of light is left. And each day here, it only gets smaller.  
  
The weight sat heavy in my stomach, fingers twitching to reach for those dwindling flashes of happiness and hold them tight, grasp them to my chest and never let them go. The laughing continued from the fire place. I wished I could have joined in, made new memories to fit into the empty spaces left behind by the others before the Darkness filled them in. But I couldn't make myself move forward, couldn't will myself to hold my weight on my own two feet, to take the few steps toward them.  
  
So I just watched.  
  
And I couldn't help but let the memories back in again, relating this to all the other apocalypses we had started, remembering how normal things still were, even when the world was ending. Back then, you could live in the blissful ignorance that the storms were just strange weather phenomena, that the news stories of all the crazy deaths were just freak coincidences, accept that everything was just fine, as long as it wasn't happening to you. But now everyone was effected. There was no blowing this off. Before, even Sam and I could sometimes forget about the all the shit storms going on with a little hunt or a quick day off. It was all so... normal.  
  
But now, there is no more normal.  
  
The silence was heavy as always.  
  
We sat around the table, picking at the cold deer meat that I cooked earlier. There was barely enough for both me and Sam, but adding Haleigh in made it even harder to ration the skinny doe that was already sickly and dying before I took it out of its misery.  
  
But I was glad to see her eating, at least, considering she was almost skin and bone and how her stomach had been growling from the moment I mentioned 'dinner'. I mean, it took me long enough to convince her that it was just chicken and that she wasn't about to eat little Bambi.  
  
I couldn't ignore the way she looked at me, head tilted down and eyes hidden by her long lashes, shyly hunched in her seat right across from mine. Every time I glanced up, she hurriedly looked away, playing with the food in her hands as she nibbled at it tentatively. At least she wasn't scared.  
  
I looked down at my plate, one of the fancy ones we found in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, already empty except for the pile of bones picked clean. My stomach rumbled at the thought of cheeseburgers and steaks and French fries and donuts. I missed being able to go out to diners and order food until I was ready to burst, and then order more. I missed fresh food that tasted good and didn't have to be shot down first. I missed hot waitresses that brought the already made food right to me. I missed not being hungry.  
  
"When are the lights going to come back on?"  
  
I looked up. I almost didn't hear her quiet question over my fantasies of food.  
  
But then her words finally registered.  
  
I swallowed hard and looked to Sam for answers.  
  
His eyes widened, hands frantically combing through his hair as he tried to find the right words. "W-well...um. We...we don't kn-"  
  
"Soon."  
  
Haleigh's gaze switched to me and a smile grew on her face, the first one directed at me. "Really?"  
  
"Yes, very soon. I will make sure of it."  
  
I could feel Sam's eyes burning holes through my skull as I was screaming at myself in my own mind to not answer the question I knew was coming next.  
  
"Promise?"  
  
"Promise." ****

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rewrite of a fic I posted on Fanfiction.net two years ago. Fair warnings: it's very dark, very disturbing, and very depressing. And there's no shipping, so don't get your hopes up.
> 
> Kudos and comments are very welcome. I always love hearing your feedback <3


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